[Action...?] To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub

[black_swimmer]

For the psychically sensitive among the Fleet, and for some of those just with open hearts and minds, the song comes in dreams and at idle, distracted moments. It creeps in at the edges of thought, the psychic echo of the whalesong bound up with loneliness and longing and fear. It's meant to call to someone, or something—father/teacher/elder/commander/god—but there is no response, and the singer casts the song out again and again over the course of hours and, intermittently, days.

One could try to reach out to that mental connection. In the surreality of dreams, the song edges into the earth and the sky, and the world becomes interjoined with a soft, shifting beach with whispering waves. Awake, the song becomes like a background chorus, and to let it in instead of pushing it away, the ocean and the glimmer of dawn on the water fill the corners of vision, as though waiting for another voice to call out.

More mundanely, one might triangulate, traveling from place to place to feel the strength of the song's psychic presence. It comes from an underlayer of the Teuberg's city, near the apartments for new arrivals. An equipment maintenance area has been retrofitted with a strange set of massive windowless metal tanks and pumps, churning through oxygenated pseudowater. In smaller but still rather large sets of glass tanks, fish and algae and crabs and snails and other marine creatures thrive in an ecosystem far too complex and robust to have developed in only a few days.

0003: NEW ARRIVALS

[crux_npcs]

Who: New Arrivals, Captain Jack Hollis, Science Captain Urist McEngineer, Graham Baker
Where: Briefing Room
When: Late afternoon
Warnings: None

When awakening, you'll find the area you're in to be very busy. The people in the medical ward are polite and understanding, but firmly refuse to answer questions until the briefing. The same goes for the robots in the hangars. Either given hospital outfits resembling very comfortable pajamas, drone bodies, or their own bodies, they are escorted by polite, unyielding people in red and black uniforms to the briefing room.

The room is large, but not quite large enough for some of the bigger Cybertronians. They've been given drone bodies at least, skinny little things with no real features beyond primitive masks made of paper plates. There's seats for everyone, at least, well-cushioned and comfortable, and the room is pleasantly lit.

A few Security personnel, dressed in their red and black uniforms, stand at ease in the rooms in strategic areas. Three men stand at the head. One is Graham Baker, a slightly nervous-seeming middle-aged man wearing a multi-layered business suit that seems rumpled and oversized. The other two men are dressed in military uniforms, one with the blue undershirt and piping of Command, while the other wears the gold of Science.

[Questions to the NPCs will go in the briefing thread. The rest of the post is there for people to mill about and do whatever with.]